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June 10, 1203
"So, uh... you can redecorate the room if you want." As he said it, Nato couldn't be quite sure why he'd chosen to start with something so trivial. Aspen had given no indication that she disliked the room as it was, so why had he bothered suggesting she might? It wouldn't have sprung from his own reservations. He had plenty of thoughts, concerns, even fears about Aspen moving in, but the physical state of his home featured in none of them.
As he settled onto the bed beside her, Aspen shook her head. "Your mother has a better eye than I do for that sort of thing."
Nato's vision darkened under the weight of his brow. His mother, the proud daughter of a clan infamous for their love of all things chaotic and scandalous and irreverent, was not a woman of poor taste--but, she lacked both the interest and the attention span to give her home's decor more than the minimal effort. Aspen's comparing herself unfavorably might have answered the question of his non sequitur. He wanted her to have a focus. A hobby. A career, if she cared for one. Something. Anything.
Anything to keep her going.
"If you say so. I just thought you might like that sort of thing. You studied art, right?"
"Textile arts--and I wasn't much good at the design part of it. I studied it for the practical aspects."
"Did you like those?"
She shrugged. He took that to mean 'As much as I like anything', and hated himself for judging her because that was exactly his opinion of his own field of study. "Not enough to make a career of it, if that's what you're suggesting. I know you'll fight me on this, but I still feel like I should be using my... abilities on more than just the occasional scrape or cut my siblings bring. And not just for my sanity."
"All right." But if only because he didn't need Aspen's help to be melancholy, Nato nestled up to her with a teasing grin. "I suppose that makes sense, given that you're a nice person--but you can't expect me to understand that, given that I'm not."
"You're nicer than you think you are."
Nato smirked. "To you, maybe."
"And since you insist I'm not nice enough to myself, that's exactly what counts." She leaned into his shoulder and took his hand, her fingers trembling somewhat in spite of her firm grip. "Are we ready for this? I mean... I know you were at my parents' place often enough that I guess we've been living together for a while now, but we never really did much. Just... talked, sat, slept."
"Don't admit that to Aldhein. He'll make some stupid joke about how we went from not even courting to being an old sexless married couple in the space of a month."
"And here I thought you'd enjoy seeing your sister punch him."
"Hmm. You're right. Do admit that to Aldhein." But he regretted it, adding to the joke, as her lashes shut to hide a green glimmer of an ache. "Sorry. Really, I... I don't know. I'm sure I'll still remember that morning when they're piling dirt on my grave, but I wish I remembered actually sleeping with you."
"You ought to be glad of that. I hadn't done that before, so I couldn't have been worth remembering. I'd never even kissed a man before that night." She cocked her head to the side, possibly under the weight of her grimace. "How pathetic is that? It takes me so long to finally kiss a man, and then I don't even remember it. I don't remember my first kiss."
He nudged her upright with an arm behind her shoulder until their noses met and all he could see were green eyes and thick lashes. "Remember this one."
NEXT CHAPTER:
June 10, 1203
"Welcome... dear." Riona had meant to say 'welcome home', but it felt somewhat presumptuous to be calling her castle Aspen's home just yet. Her daughter-in-law had only recently resolved to move in, and both she and Nato had been so hesitant about it that Riona and Isidro had agreed to treat this as a trial stay. With a vested interest in said trial going well--a happy home life would give Nato some incentive to take better care of himself--Riona didn't want to jeopardize it.
She hoped a hug, at least, wasn't stifling. Not greeting Aspen with a hug would have been aloof, and neither extreme would have made for a promising start. "How was the ride?"
"Well enough, thank you." Aspen held her breath, as if sucking in her stomach would have been enough to free their discourse of baby subtext. That... was another trial. Riona knew better than to impose her will on that either. "My parents will be by later with some of my things."
"Of course." Some of her things had already been brought. It would be a gradual move, which Riona didn't mind. She could gauge her expectations by the number of deliveries.
"Riona had your room prepared. Just let one of us know if anything's been overlooked." Isidro, as Riona might have guessed, had opted for diplomacy over familiarity. Between the two of them, perhaps they could strike an ideal balance. "I think it goes without saying that where Nato sleeps is up to you."
"He can stay." A soft request, a quiet one, but sure enough in conviction. "I don't want to be an inconvenience."
"Never a need to worry about that. If your stay here can grant you and Nato any clarity--separately or otherwise--then your presence is the exact opposite of that."
"If anything, this castle's been a little empty since our older three left home," Riona added, again substituting a phrase at the last second. 'Started their families' might have set in an acute dread about the two of them starting their own. "A great big place like this needs young people to keep the candles on in all corners. Old folks like us just want to stay curled up in one cozy little wing and leave the rest to ruin."
"You two aren't old," Aspen offered, never mind that they were older than her parents. "Thank you, though. Do you mind if I go lie down?"
Riona shook her head and watched her as her son took Aspen's hand with a slow reach. He found his haste as they touched, and the two whisked away to the castle's interior. It wasn't the usual newlywed impatience. Each of them no doubt needed space to hear themselves think first, then a little less to bounce thoughts off each other. In any case, Isidro and Riona made for two people too many in the room, and it was to their credit that they'd made sure the children had been occupied.
And with greetings out of the way, maybe they needed their space for a while too.
"Just curled up in one cozy little wing, are we?"
With a swiftness she hadn't known he still had, Isidro looped his arm about her waste and pulled her into him. How long had she known him, now? Dear Lord, they were old.
But it wasn't all that often when they stopped to consider that. "As long as I'm curled up with you."
NEXT CHAPTER:
May 5, 1203
"I, uh..."
Nato's brain fumbled about for an explanation as Lady Rona stared with an unnerving patience. He still wasn't quite sure when and how and why he'd made the decision to call on Aspen the day before. He hadn't planned on staying long, on holding her close while she let fall a few tears to his shoulder, on falling asleep fully-clothed and above the covers on a bed too small for two. He certainly hadn't planned on staying the night--and he definitely had not planned on what, if anything, he'd say to Aspen's mother if their paths crossed.
But now here he was, his escape cut short just shy of the door, cornered by Lady Rona at an hour when most of the household must have still slumbered. Aspen hadn't thought anyone would be up yet. She'd wanted Nato to leave before anyone had a chance to check up on her. Either they'd both failed to guess just how late it was, or Lady Rona had been unable to sleep and opted to go ahead with her day.
But the reasons made little difference, as the fact remained that she'd caught him now and he couldn't think of a damn thing to tell her. "...It's not what it looks like."
Aspen's mother... smirked? Most mothers didn't smirk when told that line. "I don't see why you'd be concerned about that, Nato. Given that neither of you have done much in pursuit of an annulment, no one would think much of whatever you and Aspen do when you spend the night together."
"We didn't--"
"Perhaps not, but you did spend the night together--and might I say that that was by far the longest time Aspen's been willing to spend with anyone since she graduated?"
"Um. Right. She, uh..." Nato bit his lip. Aspen must have had a hundred reasons for not having told her parents about her pregnancy yet, but he doubted that a wish for him to tell them instead was one of them. "She was caught off-guard, I guess. She had plans, and they didn't turn out, so now she needs... well, new plans."
"Which may or may not include you."
Nato dodged Lady Rona's copper gaze by fixing instead on a pair of candlesticks behind her. His own plans, if they could be called such, had been more of a means of keeping out of other people's plans. It was only a matter of time before an unlucky combination of place and people and circumstance allowed one of his fits to kill him, so he'd had no intention of being anyone's husband, anyone's father. He'd pursued knighthood in spite of his mother's fretting mainly for the hope of meeting a more dignified end before his body had him choking on his own tongue. Children came with the added concern of inheriting his condition, and the chance that their fates wouldn't take so many years to find them; childhood fits had only needed one attempt to take his father's sister, after all, his Aunt Felipa who'd never lived to be his Aunt Felipa.
Aspen would have grown up with a similar mindset. Her plan was to reduce the need for plans, to end things on her own terms. Neither of them had any ideas as to making or changing plans, with or without each other.
"I don't know if you should get your hopes up."
"Perhaps not, but if you stayed that long simply because she asked you to, then at least there are hopes that can be raised and lowered as pleased." Lady Rona raised one hand and waved it slightly, some gesture Nato was in no place to fathom. "I don't know if I even believe it myself, but something about your presence here since yesterday has had a calming effect on the air here, like Aspen's melancholy was a miasma and you dispelled it. I don't think I was the only one who felt that either."
Nato squinted. He hadn't thought Lady Rona the sort of person to misread the intangible as tangible, nor did he himself deem intangible things any more worth his time than things that didn't exist, because for all he knew, they didn't. "I don't know how a person could prove a thing like that."
"They couldn't, but that's not the thing in need of proving or disproving." Lady Rona let her hand fall back to her side, then took to the nearby couch as she nodded to the door. "I'll release you to go about your day now, but I request that you return tonight. Aspen will appreciate it."
NEXT CHAPTER:
May 4, 1203
"Oh." Based on the tread from the hallway outside, Aspen had braced herself for Darry. Of the other adult males likely to be present in her childhood home--and those had been an adult male's footsteps, the floor's response had made no secret of that--her father mostly respected her need for space, and neither Medur nor any of the manservants would have any particular reason to talk to her. So, she'd risen from her bed, fully prepared to tell her brother not to bother, that they had nothing to talk about, or at least nothing that she knew how to tell him.
She hadn't considered Nato. Nato hadn't called on her since she'd returned to her parents' castle. She hadn't seen him since their morning after. She hadn't minded. She'd assumed that he, just as she did, wanted to be left alone.
But the sands in his hourglass might have run down sooner than hers had. He, after all, had had the luxury of actually being alone.
"I wasn't expecting you."
"I wouldn't have been, in your place. I wasn't expecting to be here either." His icy eyes settled on the couch behind her. Some trace of her perpetual presence in the room must have caught his eye, a clump of red hair on the fabric or a lingering indent in the cushion. She didn't mind much if he judged her for it. Before her covert excursion of a few nights prior, she'd only left to collect the occasional scraped knee or paper-cut, just enough to hold off the assault of woes and delusions. "I guess we should talk."
Aspen nodded. She didn't want to talk to anyone, but she'd have to before long, and Nato was the logical starting point. "Let's sit down."
She made for the couch, not offering him a chance to say he'd rather stand, because he probably would have. But he joined her on the couch, because it wasn't a battle worth fighting and they weren't enemies, most of the time. "I, uh... I'm surprised that you're still in Naroni, to be honest. I thought you'd have left by now."
Her toes curled within her slipper. She'd thought the same, once. She'd only returned home for a few days recovery, but that was a month ago now. "I wouldn't be of any use there now."
Nato frowned, brow furled. Confused, no doubt. He wasn't sad that she wasn't going. He might have gotten some relief if he'd swiftly become a widower, but she didn't think him cruel enough to hope for that, not given his opposition before. "Why not?"
"Because I'm pregnant."
Her fingers twitched themselves to a white-knuckled fist, as if the words hadn't been true until she'd said them. She hadn't told anyone else. The closest she'd said was that she thought she might have been, when she'd stolen away to Lady Arydath in the dead of the night. Even the old woman's confirmation hadn't been quite enough, even her own recent caution in what she did or didn't take.
If the lack of visible reaction was a reaction in itself, then she'd sentenced Nato to a similar state. "Um... have you decided what...?"
She shook her head. "I don't know."
"Do your parents know?"
She shook it again. "I don't want to get their hopes up."
Sighing, Nato slumped forward, eyes shut in some form of proto-agreement. She didn't know if she liked that. Some part of her wished he'd swoop in and take charge and fix everything, just like some part of her wished he'd just go away forever. "I'll follow your lead, then."
"So you have nothing else to say?"
He must have, surely. She did, even if she didn't want to. She didn't want to say she didn't remember the night they'd made their baby, sleeping with him at all, what sex even felt like. She didn't even remember kissing him, if they'd even kissed. She'd never kissed anyone else, not expecting to live long enough to bother being interested. How many things there were to say about that--knowing what it was wake nauseous as some would-be person laid siege to her body, but not knowing what a man's lips felt like on her own. It was tragic and pathetic and the last thing she wanted to tell him, but it was a thing to say, and he must have had things to say too.
If he wanted to. "Nothing that would make a difference. I don't want to ruin your life. I'm sorry if I did already."
"You didn't ruin my life. I never really had a life." And why would she have had one? It was a fact she'd learned when she'd been very young, that her life was for everyone else. "Not one I could do much with, anyway."
He stared at her, one eye ice and the other blue fire, within an inch of her own, distant as the dimmest star. "Is there anything you want me to do?"
She shrugged. "Stay with me a while? We don't have to talk." She just didn't want to be alone, now that she'd said it.
Alone, to think about how she wasn't alone.
"All right."
NEXT CHAPTER:
April 29, 1203
"Good morning, gorgeous." Aldhein spun his wife into his arms and dipped her down for a kiss. It was a rare thing, his coming down for a bit of breakfast before she'd barricaded herself in her study for the morning, so they'd both come to welcome the rare morning greeting with a newlywed fervor.
And it was especially welcome now, given the presence of their... um, house guest. The children, at least, had bedtimes.
"Morning, handsome," Shahira obliged as the kiss ended and she stepped back to meet his eye. He knew that look. That was the look of someone very much in need of a passionate night. She was half a Kemorin, after all. "We really did have the worst timing last night."
"In our defense, you can't really plan for someone banging on the door to complain that our kids stole his bow and quiver."
"But we did try, given the hour." As she rolled her eyes, the signature creak of the front door sounded from the foyer. The children wouldn't be up for a while yet; the offender must have returned. "So much for a wake-up call on the kitchen floor."
Sure enough--
"My God. Are you two ever not touching each other?"
Annoyed, Aldhein scratched at the side of his nose as his brother-in-law, fresh from the training grounds and probably trailing dirt all over the floor, barged in. The fallout from his unwitting nuptials still up in the air, Nato had thusfar avoided the prospect of settling it by bouncing from residence to residence every few days, trying to stay one step ahead of anyone who might chase him down and make him face the problem. Given that Aldhein saw Nato's parents every day and could have turned him in at will, he thought he'd been generous enough in indulging him to merit the minimum standard of visitor etiquette, but Nato apparently didn't see things that way.
Particularly if his route to the basin included a swift cut between Aldhein and Shahira with no more courtesy than a kiss to his sister's cheek. "Is he keeping you from your work, sis?"
"No, but if you're planning on recovering here for a while before heading out again, I suspect you might try." Lip between her teeth, Shahira retired to a seat at the kitchen table, probably more to distance herself from the several hours' worth of sweat housed in her brother's tunic than any actual need to sit. If one of them snapped and told him to cut them from his rotation, Aldhein wasn't sure if it spoke well or poorly of him to know that it would probably be Shahira--but, not wanting to debate his own worth as a brother-in-law or a person in general at the moment, he just sighed and joined his wife at the table.
"He'd better wash more than just his hands later. Maybe lock him in the bathroom before you leave, and make sure there's soap."
"I can hear you, you know." Nato took to scrubbing his hands with a new ferocity. "Can't a man go for a piece of bread and an apple before he takes a bath? It's not as if I plan on walking around the market smelling like this."
"No, just other people's houses." Aldhein flexed his wrists beneath the surface of the table. He'd never been a violent sort, but no one could avoid the urge to strangle another person forever. "Going to the market today, then? Instead of--oh, I don't know--talking to your wife?"
Some line of sibling loyalty crossed, Shahira kicked him under the table.
Nato, however, froze for a second before busying himself with the towel in considered defeat. "Aspen doesn't want to talk to me."
"Probably true, given that anyone I know who's had much to say about it says she's barely spoken since the wedding, but you have to talk to her at some point. If I were you, I'd rather do so of my own accord than because my parents made me."
"My parents aren't-- it's complicated, all right?" Nato whipped back around, hands dry to his standard despite the gleam of wet flesh still upon them. "I know, I know, the church says we're married because we did technically consummate it, but there's bound to be something to contradict that. Surely you can't be legally married when you're as drunk as we were. It's just a matter of time before someone manages to find grounds for an annulment."
Aldhein squinted as a second gleam--a different gleam--bounced off Nato's hand as he swatted some hair out of his eyes. Not necessarily the sort of gleam he expected to see from the finger of someone who claimed to be a bachelor.
"So you just... feel obliged to keep wearing your wedding band until that happens?"
No kick this time. No freeze. Just a startled twitch, followed by a silent glare, rooted in more emotions than Aldhein deemed worth the bother of listing.
That, and a bitter groan from Shahira. "Aldhein, go to work. Nato, take a bath--then either go to your next house, or go talk to your wife."
NEXT CHAPTER:
March 3, 1203
"So." Dress donned and hair tidied, Aspen yanked the blanket over the telltale stains of the night before. Not that Nato remembered having any part in making them. "As soon as you walk out this door--this never happened. Agreed?"
"Agreed," Nato muttered as he finished lacing up his boots, his own voice too much for his throbbing head. As if either of their lives weren't complicated enough without their apparently having fucked in a mutual state of black-out drunkenness.
At least--he hoped it had been mutual.
"Um... I know this never happened, but I didn't...?"
She shrugged. What did that mean? If he'd traumatized her, she'd surely have been more shaken up. Unless she was repressing it, that was. Fuck. "I don't remember anything. You don't remember anything. For all we know, maybe I did to you what you're afraid you did to me. If one of us is a criminal, maybe it's better if we don't know who it is. If it's someone's fault, then it happened. But it didn't."
Right. It hadn't happened. As far as anyone had to know, all he'd woken up to was the headache to end all headaches. No doubt the only reason Aspen hadn't robbed him of that was that doubling her own hangover would make the non-event less of a non-event. "What time do you think it is? Am I safe to leave?"
Aspen winced as she glanced back out the window. Nato took the hint not to look for any sunlight himself. "It's day, but I think it's still early? My housemates should still be asleep."
"Good." Nato cracked his knuckles, caught off-guard by the cold touch of his own fingers. Damn hungover senses. "Um... so, that was not a thing I expected to not happen."
"Ah, but since it didn't happen, there's no sense in discussing it." Aspen asserted herself with a grimace and gestured to the door with a jerk of her head. "And you were never here, so you'd better get on that."
"Right." He sidled past her, their parting little more than a pat he dared land on her shoulder. It was probably the last time he'd see her, if her plan really was to leave the country, probably heading off to her death. But no--the last time he'd seen her had been the last time, he'd have to remind himself. This time hadn't happened, after all.
Or so he would have spent the rest of the day, the week, God knew how long convincing himself if his plan to slip away from Capricorn House unnoticed hadn't been an instant and spectacular failure.
"Good morning, Nato."
Oh fuck me. "...This isn't what it looks like."
"I think you're right about that." Darry smiled, the impossible sparkle of his teeth more than Nato's sore eyes and the brain behind them could handle. The oddity of such a wide grin on a man who'd just caught someone he barely tolerated leaving the bedroom of his virginal sister didn't exactly ease the strain. "You needn't worry about last night. I saw the two of you heading in there, you know--and believe me when I say you were both most enthusiastic."
And a statement like that might have been a dagger to the forehead. "What are you playing at here?"
"I'm not playing at anything, Nato. Everyone who knows my sister knows just how much she needed a good lay."
"And if you've been standing here with your ear to the door, then you'll know she'd rather people think she still did, because no one else is going to find out about last night."
Darry snickered. "My God, Nato, I didn't realize the two of your were that drunk. Everyone already knows. You kept the whole building up all night, for one--like my poor little sister. She's asleep on the couch in the sitting room, and she'll probably still be out for hours before she has to wake up to her first ever hangover, and to the memory of Aspen and Nato making the floor vibrate. And even before you got back here, you two were all over each other; I'm fairly sure you licked her out under the table at the inn at one point."
And yet, that knife-twisting smirk didn't waver in the slightest. "For a concerned older brother, you seem to find all of this much too amusing."
"Concerned older brother?" Darry laughed again, practically spitting needles into Nato's skull. "Christ, you two really do remember nothing! You and Aspen didn't go right back to Capricorn House after you left the inn, you know. A few of us followed after you two got thrown out, and none of us were ready to call it a night just yet, so we ended up dropping in on the biggest party animal in Veldorashire."
"Who the fuck is the biggest party--?" Nato cut himself off, the flash of a face in his mind's eye twisting his throbbing brain to the halt. That face, the mingled smells of wine and incense and jimsonweed, the acute awareness of a foreign object against his finger. "No!"
"Kind of sad for the rest of us, given his age and all. But, no sense in judging." Darry shrugged--now a much less flattering gesture than the one Aspen used to deny having slept with him. "That's the Lord's job, after all, even if Father Sextus wasn't one of his own men."
Father. Fucking. Sextus.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK.
His mind a swirling mess of spirits and obscenities and horrified realizations, Nato would never quite know how he'd summoned the presence of mind to shuffle back to Aspen's door and nudge his fist against it. The only thought he'd have in focus when his father arrived to collect him some hours later would be the repeating assurance that--at the very least--neither he nor Aspen were at fault.
"Aspen? I think there was something else that didn't happen last night..."
NEXT CHAPTER:
March 2, 1203
"Nato! How's my favorite former housemate?"
It wasn't an answer, but Nato had no more polite a response than a skeptical tilt of the head. In truth, he didn't doubt that he was at the bottom of Falidor's list in that category--and the only reason Falidor wasn't in that same position for him was that he'd made no active efforts to get to know anyone he'd lived with at the university and therefore lacked the data to accurately rank. That, and perhaps that Falidor only annoyed him by virtue of being Falidor, as opposed to someone like Darry who went out of his way to be a pain in the ass.
But whatever Falidor thought of Nato, the idea of an acquaintance he almost never saw dropping by without notice and requesting to see him specifically would have been difficult enough to wrap his head around even if the two of them did have anything in common. "I think we'd both leave this conversation in a better mood if you just got to whatever point you have in coming here."
"Right." Falidor stretched his grimace further, as if that didn't do more harm than good to their current standing. "It's the first Sunday of March."
"So?"
"So... tomorrow's Ditch Day."
"Oh." Of course that would have been a notable occasion for Falidor even after he'd graduated. For Nato--well, he could think of at least one person with influence over Falidor who might have thought he ought to get out more. "Shit. Your brother put you up to dragging me to some drunk-fest on campus, didn't he?"
"To be fair, I think your sister put him up to putting me up to it, but yes."
Nato caught the side of his tongue between his teeth. Shahira, of all people, thinking he needed to party more. More likely Aldhein was just covering his own ass by feigning her involvement. "Falidor, if I wanted to go to those parties, I would have done so when I was still living on campus."
"I know--but now you can go with the smug superiority of a graduate! That sounds rather more your speed to me."
Nato's eye twitched. If Falidor thought that, then he might not have been Falidor's least favorite after all; Falidor was, apparently, a terrible judge of character. "Actually, that sounds like an even bigger waste of time. Aldhein really should have given you some hint about how to bribe or threaten me into going, if either of you care that much whether or not I do."
"He should have, for sure. But now that you mention it, I seem to remember him saying a while back something about how you hit your head during training and you didn't want your mother to find out?"
Well. Fuck me. "...Fine. But I'm not staying long."
NEXT CHAPTER:
January 13, 1203
"Didn't your mother ever teach you that it's rude to barge into someone else's bedroom?"
Not that Aspen, from the looks of her, had any intention of actually going to bed. She was fully dressed, hair still pinned at the side, and not hint of fatigue in her voice or face. Nato would take that, at least, for a break from her borrowed maladies.
As for his reply, he'd take a different approach. "This isn't your bedroom. This is a guest bedroom--and not even your guest bedroom, I might add. You weren't going to spend the night here, but you said you were tired, so Yvanette took pity on you and Sevvie will spend the night in Sir Neilor's study."
"So I'm to believe you were looking for Yvanette and Sevvie, then?"
"Don't be stupid. Your idiot brother figured you'd heard about some ill servant, so he sent me off to find you--because apparently his sweetheart has it in her head that he pays you more attention than he does her."
"And apparently he doesn't know about your fits, if he'll send you in his stead."
"And I have half a mind to tell him if he'll leave me alone! I have problems of my own, you know; I don't have to take on yours as well."
"Good. I never wanted you to."
"Good."
"Fine."
"Great."
"Right."
Good. He'd never asked to know about Aspen's powers. He'd barely had anything to do with her before he'd found out, and his life had been that much easier. Why the hell had he gotten involved in the first place?
Oh. Right. "Why do you keep doing this?"
Scowling, Aspen's crossed-arm hold on her own chest tightened. "It feels worse not to."
Bullshit. People like Nato and Aspen didn't live in a world where worse existed. It couldn't exist, not without a better to compare it to. There was bad, and there was different bad, but there was no worse. Aspen was kidding herself if she thought there was.
But, she did this to herself. She could have claimed a land of better if she wanted to. "What, morally? Do you really think--"
"No! Not morally! Morals are incidental!" Her arms had dropped to her sides, fists clenched to the point of redness. "If I don't use my powers, then they use me. If I see an injury, or an illness, I'll take it--because it's better. If I don't use my powers, then the things they'll take for me are the invisible things. And you have no idea how many invisible things there are. And you can't lie in bed and wait them out, or bind them for a few weeks and hope they heal. How can you cure them if you can't see them?"
Invisible. Invisible, until they weren't.
Pain that no one saw. Screams that no one heard. Prayers to gods that were dead or indifferent or had never existed at all.
He understood, now. Or, he thought he did.
"Aspen--"
"Shut up, Nato. You get it. You're the only one who knows who gets it.
"You said I didn't have to live like you did. Well, this is me doing that."
NEXT CHAPTER:
